Searching on the basis of search terms or keywords has become pervasive. Users rely on documents, postings, links or other materials (e.g., “hits”) to be returned from a lexical query. However, users are often looking for meaning or insight that might be present in the hits. Indeed, insight is often present in the hits/documents, but the sought-after insight is often buried in the content of the hits—and often using terms that are different than the lexical terms used in the original lexical query. In legacy searching, the user must read through the hits in order to extract meaning, insight, and sentiment. Users need a way to explicitly express the user's desire to gain insight into the sentiment (e.g., positive sentiment, negative sentiment, sentiment score, etc.) reflected in the retrieved documents. Moreover, a user would want to explicitly express the general area of inquiry for which the sentiment is desired to be understood, even though the general area of sentiment might be orthogonal to the lexical terms.
In particular, users need a way to form queries that not only return a list of lexical “hit” results, but that also return results after performance of some semantic or sentiment analysis that addresses the user's informational need.
Even modern search engines do not provide a mechanism for users to explicitly indicate that they want to “mine” sentiment in addition to receiving the raw “lexical hit” search results. The needs of such users are acute enough that often painstaking and largely manual efforts are undertaken in order to “mine” sentiment from lexical hit results. Worse, often a user's informational or insight needs are ultimately satisfied from mined results that derive from terms, concepts or entities that are not present within the lexical terms or keywords specified in the lexical query. What is needed is a technique or techniques such that a user can express an informational need or insight need in conjunction with a user's specified lexical search terms.
Legacy approaches fail to offer the capabilities of the herein-disclosed techniques for explicitly specifying a desire for sentiment analysis, and/or for producing sentiment-aware results from a sentiment-aware search query. Therefore, there is a need for improvements.